I am paraphrasing the Adorno quote somewhat for clarity. In fact, the word-for-word quote most often seen is “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”, although there is a larger context to be found in the paragraphs around it, about the impossibility of the very existence of culture after the Holocaust.

In the nineties, I was invited along to a few family events ( birthday parties, Christmas Eve, that kind of thing) and learned quickly that the composition and recitation of a poem — written in the guest’s honor — was Pflicht in certain German families. The poems were kind, maybe a little humorous but always done with warm feelings and in the simplest of rhyme scheme and iambic tetrameter (well-known example: “I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree”)

I bring this up because I have just read Ilse Weber, Wann wohl das Leid ein Ende hat: Briefe und Gedichte aus Theresienstadt.

The letters begin much earlier, in 1933 — Weber corresponded with her good friend Lilian Löwenadler, daughter to a Swedish diplomat and living in England. For five years, these letters are filled with normal banter between two highly intelligent women, involving family, children, Weber’s radio engagements, Löwenadler’s new romance. In 1938 the letters take on a much more urgent tone, as Weber and her husband Willi contemplate the risk of sending her oldest boy Hanusch, age 8, to England with the Kindertransports. Hanusch is indeed sent to Lilian and her new husband, then on to Lilian’s mother in Stockholm.
Ilse Weber is moved with her husband and younger son, Tommy, into the Prague Ghetto, and from there to Theresienstadt. Her letters, once pages long, are reduced to a few lines of allowed information, including the probably mandatory “We are healthy.” At this point, no longer allowed to pour her emotions into her letters, she instead turns to poetry for her small charges (she works as the night nurse in the hospital’s children’s ward), unable to spend more than fleeting moments with her husband and her younger son. She writes about all of this in a simple, naive rhyming style that Adorno might not have known what to make of. Her poems, while in an old-fashioned framework, tell honestly and bluntly of the events surrounding her, her fellow inmates, and the above all the children. Her poems tell of little boys sent by their mothers to return stolen coal, of abandoned suitcases, of homesickness, of death.
Where the poems end, an Afterword takes up the narrative. Willi was deported to Poland with 5000 other men and lost contact with his wife. Just before he left Theresienstadt he gathered up all of his wife’s poems, songs and other papers and buried them beneath the floor of a tool shed. Not long afterward, all the patients in the children’s ward were deported as well. Ilse, not wanting them to make the journey untended, took Tommy and traveled with the children — to Auschwitz. She was last seen with her younger son and about fifteen small children, in the line leading to the gas chambers. An acquaintance from Theresienstadt worked there, and risked his neck to approach her. She asked if they were to take showers, and he told her the truth. He also offered some advice — sit the children down on the chamber floor and sing songs with them. The gas will work more quickly that way. Years later he confessed this chance meeting to her son Hanusch, who after the war was reunited with his father. Willi Weber was able to retrieve Ilse’s hidden papers, and much later Lilian’s husband (she died during the war) found the letters in an attic in England.

My dear boy, three years ago today
You were sent into the world alone.
I still see you, at the station in Prague,
how you cry from the compartment, and hesitate.
You lean your brown head against me
and how you beg; let me stay with you!
That we let you go, seemed hard for you —
You were just eight, and small and delicate.
And as we left for home without you,
I felt, my heart would explode
and nevertheless I am happy that you’re not here.
The stranger who is taking you in
will surely go to Heaven.
I bless her with every breath I take —
Your love for her will not be enough.
It has become so murky around us here,
Everything has been taken away from us.
House, home, not even a corner of it left,
Not a piece of what we loved and prized.
Even the toy train which belonged to you
And your brother’s little rocking horse…
They did not even let us keep our names:
We walk through the streets marked like cattle:
With numbers around our necks. That would not be so bad,
If I were with your father in the same house!
Not even the little one may stay with me…
I was never so alone in my life.
You are still small, and you hardly can understand…
So many are pressed together in one room.
Body against body, you carry the suffering of the other,
And feel the full pain of your own loneliness.
My boy, are you healthy and learning your studies?
No one sings you to sleep now.
Sometimes in the night it seems
That I feel you next to me.
Just think, when we see each other again
We will not understand each other.
You’ve long ago forgotten your German in Sweden,
and I, I can’t speak Swedish at all.
Won’t that be strange? If only it already were,
then I’d suddenly have a grown son…
Do you still play with tin soldiers?
I am living in a real Barrack,
With dark walls and dreary rooms
There’s no sun, nor leaves and trees.
I’m a nurse here for the children
And it’s nice, to help and comfort them.
Sometimes I stay awake with them at night,
the little lamp doesn’t give much light,
I sit and guard their rest,
And to me every child is a little piece of “you”.
My thoughts then fly to you
and nevertheless, I am happy that you are not here.
And I would gladly suffer a thousand torments,
If I could pay for your childhood happiness that way…
It is late now and I want to sleep.
If I could only see you for a moment!
But I can do nothing except write letters,
Full of longing, never to be sent.

“Letter To My Child” existed in copy — a woman who had been imprisoned in Ravensbrück gave a copy of the poem to the Swedish author Amelie Posse, who was visiting camps with the Swedish Red Cross. Posse had the poem translated into Swedish and published in the newspaper in 1945 (the poem’s autobiographical elements revealed a child living in Sweden). So in this way Ilse’s letter did reach her son, three years after it had been written.

Sleep, little friend, you are so tired,
The train is singing its monotonous song,
The night creeps softly in.
You are still small, and still find rest,
Let your dear eyes close,
We’re going now to Poland.

Sleep, little child, we’re already so far,
Ah, long sunken in darkness
our home, stolen from us.
We held it dear, it was taken away,
Now we sit here silently, and find no words
and travel far — to Poland.

Sleep, little friend, I’ll watch over you,
From your sweet rest I wish
to find comfort and strength for myself.
The stars are shining bright and pure,
I no longer want to be sad,
God is in Poland too.